Wednesday, I was glued to my computer, fascinated by the spectacle I saw on my screen. After a so-called blitzkrieg but completely failed invasion that lingers in blood, after phenomenal military errors, after tens of thousands of dead and even more crippled, after torture and atrocities, Vladimir Putin’s Russia celebrated a year of war in triumph.
At Russia’s biggest stadium, Luzhniki, in Moscow, the party looked like a big show Super Bowl halftime. We had put the package: rock stars, dozens of dancers in blue, red and white – colors of the country – who wiggled on the stage, huge screens, famous actors who played masters of ceremonies. With the difference that over there, we were singing about war and bombarding the crowd with images of destroyed buildings and heroic soldiers to crush the morale of the 80,000 people brought in by bus for the occasion. The dessert was obviously the arrival with great fanfare of the President, Vladimir Putin. He had nothing of Stalin or Hitler. In great shape, relaxed, almost casual, he reminded me of Pierre Lalonde for a few seconds. He spoke of family and homeland and praised the soldiers on stage who were defending the homeland.
“Defend the Fatherland”, because in Russia, NATO is the aggressor that pulls the strings of the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv and wants to destroy Russia.
At Luzhniki Stadium, the invasion of Ukraine has become a romantic adventure. And Vladimir Putin is well in the saddle. The troops are being prepared for a long war. The image makers of the Kremlin apparatus are obviously champions.
Elsewhere in Saint Petersburg, the Wagner group, the militia of the formidable warlord Yevgeny Prigojine, does not give its place. He has his film studios. The latest success Hell’s finest1, a pure war film, inspired by the incredibly violent fighting at the heart of the Azovstal steel complex in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol last spring. All this is reminiscent of Soviet productions of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War. With the only difference that in fact, on February 24, 2022, it was not the Germans who attacked a sovereign people, but rather the Russian army. Never mind, in Putin’s parallel universe, the world is upside down.
All this war madness did not appear by magic. Let us remember the mega garage sale of the 1990s in the former USSR where everything was found on the market, from the nuclear submarine to the old pair of shoes. The collapse of the Soviet Union caused a feeling of humiliation for millions of people who felt cheated during a brutal economic crisis. The soil was fertile.
This war redefines the identity of Russia. Ukrainian culture is strangled to better fix Russian culture. The TV will give you the outline of the story.
On show Tonight with Vladimir Solovyov, Guy A. Lepage of state television, there are seven guests, all men, who will reinforce the idea that Ukraine is a Nazi state, that it must be defeated to save the good Ukrainian people, the little brother. They will also go further. Western values of tolerance will be ridiculed. Homophobia will be celebrated. Western countries will be damned and democracy will be a fabrication.
The Russian “star system” thus embraces the discourse. He sided resolutely with Vladimir Putin. There was, however, a time, before 2014, when the comedian who became Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, shared the stage of Russian state television with the characters who today want him dead. Since then, the discourse has evolved, Russian nationalism has turned very very to the right and Volodymyr Zelensky has chosen Ukraine.
I was watching a video of Ivan Okhlobystin, a well-known actor and director, a rising artist and apparently not nostalgic for the USSR when I lived in Moscow in the 1990s. For him, the invasion in Ukraine is not nothing less than a holy war.
Shaman, a popular singer, shouts at the top of his lungs: “I am Russian, my blood comes from my father. You can’t break me. I am Russian, against all odds. I am Russian, until the end2. His success has 1.8 million views on YouTube. On social networks, we see videos of young students dancing frantically to his music.
“Do you really believe all this, you Russian champions of cynicism? I asked a Russian friend still in Moscow. “Some believe in it, but many are silent as in the days of the USSR, he confides to me. After 70 years of Soviet repression, the old reflexes are not lost. We don’t like to see people die, but what can we do? Talking would put us at risk. We become fatalistic. »
And if Putin’s warlike adventure hit a wall after all these tens or hundreds of thousands of useless deaths, what would we do with you? “The awakening could be terribly brutal,” worries the only friend I have left in the Moscow capital.